cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was thinking about tiger lilies yesterday In late June the tiger lilies come popping up from the edged of every un-mown roadside ditch, hanging orange over the tangle of grass and honeysuckle. Trees of paradise rise up behind the tiger lilies like something from a tropical island that took a wrong turn at Albequerque and somehow ended up growing in Virginia. Under the honeysuckle and the poison ivy and such lie the bones of legions of deer and possums and raccoons and everything else that gets plowed over every day by cars that usually don't even stop to see what they hit. April tends to be the season of dead skunks. Which there aren't more than 1 or 2 every 10 miles or so, but it doesn't take very many flattened skunks to make a strong impression on anyone within a few miles. In May you get raccoons, belly up. June brings squirrels with brushy grey tails that swish in the breeze of passing cars. July is a bit of everything. August is heralded by a parade of dead, adolescent groundhogs and foxes that continues into September until October's early rut sends the deer running wild into the headlights all the way past Thanksgiving. You could probably dig less than 4 inches down in any square foot of ditch in this county before you'd find a bone or a tooth of some anonymous critter or another. Some people feel the need to arrange them in gardens. The tiger lilies. Rows or masses of them in beds edged by mismatched stone near the mailbox. Lawn jockey gardens. Honeysuckle pouring out of the metal tube surrounding the guy wires on telephone poles. Every quarter mile another grey concrete rectangular marker hidden somewhere in the mess. Woodlice curled up together in balls under the leaves that take exception to the sudden daylight but don't seem ready to move on. Nameless black beetles that run in every direction and worms that shrink into holes. A skink that you only saw out of the corner of your eye. You can eat a tiger lily but you won't. Some people call them orange day lilies. The saw palmetto is all in bloom and its 5 or 6 foot stalks tower over the lilies with clusters of small white flowers. Neither is a particularly elegant or subtle sort of a flower. Blackberry briars gather round them like storm clouds. Out of nothing, thorns. In July they will hang with black and red fruit that buzzes with wasps and bumblebees. It will take you all day to get enough berries for one pie, because of the thorns and the stingers that you will have to move very carefully around. The next day you will not be able to go back for more because the black bears will have slipped in like black shadows and eaten it, berries and ants and bees and all. By the end of June the bears have just about wrapped up their annual feast of little spotted fawns that the deer leave hidden in the tall grass while they look for food. By the end of June the surviving fawns are following their mothers around and can no longer be found alone and vulnerable and tender. The fawn season is over and the blackberry season has begun. I will forget all of this by the end of December. I will forget that the lilies exist. I will forget what saw palmetto blossoms look like. The smell of humid air laced with pollen and vibrating with the songs of cicadas will be totally lost to me. It doesn't mean anything. Not on its own. I can describe every detail of a Virginia summer but it doesn't mean anything. Just some plants and some animals and some bones and insects. I wish it all meant something that I could wrap up in a bow; something that would give me a grand conclusion about God and the meaning of life and an afterlife and whatever else. But its all just a tangled bank, isn't it? A tangled bank that tells me nothing about anything except a roadside ditch and some lilies. It isn't even as eternal as one would like to think. The lilies and tree of paradise are native to Asia, the dandilions to Europe, the grasses to England, etc. In 100 years these same stretches of road will look completely different following the arrival of a whole new set of invasive, alien species of plants and animals. 2:09 p.m. - 2009-06-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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